Freedom

The 4th of July is nearly upon us.  A day when we celebrate the freedoms that we have in this great country of ours.  As I think about freedom, I am reminded of a number of recent conversations that I have had related to the to concept of freedom.  Most of these have centered on the relationship between human freedom and divine Sovereignty.  Allow me in the blog today to get a little philosophical.  First of all, I will in no way do justice to this deep and weighty topic, but I want to introduce a few thoughts that hopefully will help to shape our understanding of what the Scriptures say on this topic.

We as people tend to focus on free will.  We want to believe that we have a choice and that if we are held responsible for our actions that we had total responsibility for these actions.  This is a faulty understanding of free will.  This view is often referred to as Libertarian free will - the freedom to choose whatever we want.  And it is rare even in practice here on earth that we have this kind of free will.  Think about a simple choice that you made today.  What did you have for breakfast?  At initial glance this seems like it was all your choice.  You could choose to eat whatever you wanted or nothing at all.  That is a completely free choice right?

Now consider the following circumstances that actually not only influenced but in some cases controlled your seemingly free choice.  You were bound to choose between only the options that were available to you.  You could not eat anything for breakfast.  For instance if you wanted caviar or Chicago Style Deep dish pizza, chances are you did not have that in your fridge and it was not within you ability to purchase it in time before you went to work.  You were confined to what was available.  But that is not the only thing that controlled your decision. Time also strongly influenced what you had to eat this morning.  If you woke up 20 minutes late for work already you did not make Eggs Benedict.  You grabbed something quick and rushed to work.  If you had all the time in the world, chances are you had something larger than a granola bar. 

These two things, time and availability influenced and even controlled your choices.  And that is not even talking about many of the other things that did the same.  Consider your history and what you like and don't like.  The things that make you ill or that you are allergic to.  Consider if you had to make breakfast for just yourself or for your family.  All of these things and many more were factors in your decision.  You did not think about these factors, you simply chose something to eat.  Because of your practice of making these decisions, it seemed second nature to simply eat and so you did.  But the decision was not free in the Libertarian definition of freedom.  You had a defined freedom - freedom within a select set of confines.

So here is the question.  Was your decision this morning any less free because it was influenced and even controlled by a variety of factors?  Did you feel robotic because you knew the limitations that you faced when you made your choice?  Of course not.  It felt and was a genuine choice. 

The fact that we talk about the sovereignty of God being a limitation on human freedom is not something that eliminates human freedom.  In fact, as you study Scripture, it is because of the sovereignty of God that we can even talk about human freedom.  But that is a topic for another blog.  Perhaps in the future we will do a series on the topic.

Do you have a topic that you think I should cover?   Leave a note in the comments below!